Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

- Goldsmith, Oliver

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Locke, John

Beware of the person of one book.

Aquinas, St. Thomas

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

Howells, William Dean

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Harington, John

I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed -- and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.

Dawkins, John

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

True, Herbert

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

10.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

11.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

12.

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Levine, Ghita

13.

Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!

Baudelaire, Charles

14.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Mcluhan, Marshall

15.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

16.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Baker, Nicholson

17.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

Martineau, Harriet

18.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

19.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Vaneigem, Raoul

20.

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

21.

Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill by the numbers, recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.

Gross, Jacquelyn

22.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

Rosten, Leo

23.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Neruda, Pablo

24.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Bloom, Allan

25.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Seferis, Giorgos

26.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

Edwards, Tryon

28.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

Wells, Carolyn

29.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

30.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Mencken, H. L.

31.

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Adler, Mortimer J.

32.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Brodsky, Joseph

33.

A good book is the very essence of a good man. His virtues survive in it, while the foibles and faults of his actual life are forgotten. All the goodly company of the excellent and great sit around my table, or look down on me from yonder shelves, waiting patiently to answer my questions and enrich me with their wisdom. A precious book is a foretaste of immortality.

Cuyler, Theodore L.

34.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

35.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Carter, Angela

36.

Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.

Brown, Les

37.

Books in a large university library system: 2, 000,000. Books in an average large city library: 1 0,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30, 000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20, 000.

Horowitz, Lois

38.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

39.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.

Coolio

40.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

41.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

42.

A wicked book cannot repent.

Proverb

43.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost always a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Mann, Horace

44.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

Orwell, George

45.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

46.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Butler, Samuel

47.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Jackson, George Holbrook

48.

The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul.

Hood, Paxton

49.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it --when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Rushdie, Salman

50.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Hemingway, Ernest